• DOI:10.1126/SCIENCE.1064088
• Corpus ID: 30688

Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning: Current Knowledge and Future Challenges

@article{Loreau2001BiodiversityAE,
  title={Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning: Current Knowledge and Future Challenges},
  author={Michel Loreau and Shahid Naeem and Pablo Inchausti and Jan Bengtsson and John Philip Grime and Andy Hector and David U Hooper and Michael A. Huston and David G. Raffaelli and Bernhard Schmid and David Tilman and David A. Wardle},
  journal={Science},
  year={2001},
  volume={294},
  pages={804 - 808}
}

• M. Loreau, S. Naeem, +9 authors D. Wardle
• Published 26 October 2001
• Environmental Science
• Science

The ecological consequences of biodiversity loss have aroused considerable interest and controversy during the past decade. Major advances have been made in describing the relationship between species diversity and ecosystem processes, in identifying functionally important species, and in revealing underlying mechanisms. There is, however, uncertainty as to how results obtained in recent experiments scale up to landscape and regional levels and generalize across ecosystem types and processes. Larger numbers of species are probably needed to reduce temporal variability in ecosystem processes in changing environments. A major future challenge is to determine how biodiversity dynamics, ecosystem processes, and abiotic factors interact.